Tutorial - A Mini Book to Organise Scraps and Everyday Photos

(Sorry for the delay again, my server wasn't letting me upload the last couple of photos!)

Warning - this is a photo heavy post!

I wanted another project to use up some more of my paper off cuts and little scrappy bits. And while I was thinking about making the project, we were backing up all the photos from my Ipod touch (thankfully just before it got thrown down the toilet and destroyed by my baby!). There were photos from a whole year still stored on there, and I realised there were a lot of them that I hadn't done anything with - because either the quality was too bad, or they didn't have a 'big' story to go with them.

So I can up with this mini-album, inspired by Heidi Swapp's memory files, and Amy Tan's Day Books. Here's my Mini File Folder Album:

The box started life as a cup-a-soup packet, 5" tall by 4" wide, which I cut the lid and front off of:

I used the flap of the lid to trace around, for the tab cut-out of the front:

Then I painted the inside of the box with gesso, covered the outside of the box with patterned paper from my scrap pile (using Mod-Podge to adhere it), and made the title by cutting a label-shape with my Slice design cutter, and layering on paper, mini-alphas, a butterfly, and gems:

Then, for the files to go inside I sorted out a couple of piles of paper, one of larger off-cuts, and one of smaller scraps:

I cut some of the larger pieces to 11" x 3¾" (so they were twice the height of the box, plus a little extra to adhere a tab to), and then a few more strips getting a little smaller each time. I layered some of these up, and machine stitched them down the middle, day-book style (a couple of these have a smaller piece at the back - the machine stitching just goes along the bottom edge of this back piece, but through the middle of the layers on top):

I cut other bits down to 6" x 4", some are a little thinner because the scraps were smaller, and some are funny shapes where bits had been cut off before:

Then I took a big batch of mini photos, which were all approx 2" square:

And put them into the 'files' along with decoration of the smaller scraps, and other bits and pieces (I've made a slideshow of the day-book style files, as there were so many photos:

They all have different 'tabs' at the top, spaced out in different places, so you can see which one you'd like to pull out from the file box. A lot of the tabs are chipboard pieces which I stuck to the top of the file, and then cut around, so they were left sticking up at the top. All the files ended up around 5" high, plus the height of the tabs:

I love having somewhere to record all these little moments, and that they don't have to be connected like I'd want them to be in a mini-book. There's still some space and some spare files for me to finish using all those photos up too. Then I'll need to make another box for some more!

Do you print out any photos of 'little moments' to use in little projects?

Remember that a comment on this post, or on any of my posts from this weekend, will count as an entry into the Grand Giveaway {NOW CLOSED}- but only if you've registered your interest in winning that here!

See you shortly! x

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